The Payola scandal reaches a new level of public prominence
and legal gravity on this day 1960, when President Eisenhower
called it an issue of public morality and the FCC proposed a
new law making involvement in Payola a criminal act.

What exactly was Payola? During the hearings conducted by Congressman Oren Harris (D-Arkansas) and his powerful
Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight—fresh off its inquiry
into quiz-show rigging—the term was sometimes used as a
blanket reference to a range of corrupt practices in the radio
and recording industries.

   
Albert James "Alan" Freed 
(December 15, 1921 – January 20, 1965)        

      
      
     
In 1960, payola was made illegal. In December 1962, after
being charged on multiple counts of commercial bribery, 
Freed pled guilty to two counts of commercial bribery,
fined three hundred dollars and was given a suspended 
sentence.

On February 8, 1943, Japanese troops evacuate Guadalcanal,
leaving the island in Allied possession after a prolonged
campaign. The American victory paved the way for other
Allied wins in the Solomon Islands.

While in orbit 170 miles above Earth, Navy Captain Bruce
McCandless II became the first human being to perform
an untethered spacewalk, when he exits the U.S. space
shuttle Challenger and maneuvers freely, using a bulky
white jet pack of his own design.

McCandless orbited Earth in tangent with the shuttle at
speeds greater than 17,500 miles per hour—the speed
at which satellites normally orbit Earth—and flew up to
320 feet away from the Challenger. After an hour and a
half of testing and flying the jet-powered backpack and
admiring Earth, McCandless safely reentered the shuttle.

Bruce McCandless II
(June 8, 1937 – December 21, 2017)

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter
of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped
from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by three armed men.

Her fiancee, Steven Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a
neighbor who tried to help. Witnesses reported seeing a struggling Hearst being carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk
of a car. Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to take cover after the kidnappers fired their guns to cover their escape.

Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small
U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station
that it was holding Hearst as a “prisoner of war.” Four days later,
the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to
every needy person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done,
said the SLA, negotiation would begin for the return of Patricia
Hearst.

Patricia Campbell Hearst will turn 70 on February 20th.

Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” beginning “Once
upon a midnight dreary,”was published on this day in the New
York Evening Mirror.

Poe’s dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous and
difficult life. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age
three and went to live with the family of a Richmond, Virginia, businessman. Poe studied at the University of Virginia but was
expelled for gambling. He later enrolled briefly at a military
academy. 

     
      
       
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849)